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Unlike traditional market segmentations that are based on a correlation of product sales or service with the attributes of the purchaser (such as age, gender, income level, and education level), jobs-based segmentation seeks to understand the causal roots of purchase—when a buyer needs to "hire" a product or service to get a "job" done. This note details the thought process and the methodology behind a jobs-based segmentation and provides numerous examples. It highlights three levels in the architecture of a job: 1) What is the fundamental job or problem the customer is facing? This includes political, functional, emotional, and social dimensions; 2) What are the experiences in purchase and use that, if all provided, would sum up to nailing the job perfectly? (The "hiring criteria"); and 3) What do we need to integrate, and how must we knit those things together, so that we can provide these experiences?

After its spin-off from one of the world's largest ultrasound makers, Sonosite attempts to popularize a new kind of handheld ultrasound units. Sonosite needs to decide if it should focus on new markets that will value the portability and ease of use of its products, or if it should evolve its offerings so that they appeal to radiologists and cardiologists, the largest purchasers of ultrasound systems.

After two years of less than stellar performance resulting in sales well below plan, senior management at General Motors (GM) mobile telecommunications service start-up, OnStar, recognized that without a substantial change in their strategy, support for the venture would dwindle. Chet Huber (HBS 1979) faced one of the toughest decisions of his career. He had to decide whether to press GM executives to approve a plan to factory install OnStar hardware on every vehicle it manufactured—a new strategy requiring a dramatic increase in the corporation's commitment to the struggling technology venture. The alternative would be to continue with the current strategy of selling OnStar as an aftermarket product at GM dealerships. GM produced over five million new vehicles a year. Installing OnStar on every vehicle could exponentially increase the subscriber base but would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and lead to an unknown number of changes both within OnStar and at GM factories.